The sad thing is that we've been super happy customers of ServerBeach for ages now, they do a great job, but they really shafted us here.

So, as long as they agreed no to do this to ya, I'd heartily recommend them... I'm hoping that we hear that from them shortly too.

Do you guys plan on staying with ServerBeach? Was their hosting cheaper than rolling your own infrastructure on EC2?

Good question, and one we've already looked into a fair bit as we already host all of our uploads on Amazon.

Back in the day we figured that it would probably be cheaper and more extensible to use Amazon... however given that things weren't broken, and the amount of time and effort we'd put into our SB setup we decide that it wasn't worth switching.

We're lucky enough to have one of the best SysAdmins in the business, I wouldn't trade him for his weight in gold, but even with him and his assistants working flat out at that the cost and time of moving to another setup would far outweigh the other cost benefit... after all we're pretty freaking big:

http://www.quantcast.com/edublogs.org

So previously that's how we've figured it out... if SB agree that they won't do something like this to us again without first at least making sure they call and speak to us, then we'll probably continue... it just makes sense.

With a bit of luck all this publicity will make them realise how important it is.